Golf Central

On this day in 1923, Jack Burke Jr was born in Houston, Texas, and went on to a lifetime in golf that included not only two major championships, but also an introspective but joyous and often misunderstood love of the game.

That's because Jack Burke Jr always considered the game of golf "a game". He loved the passion and feel of it, and having grown up in windy Texas, Burke was a "feel" player. He was also, to use an IGWT catchphrase, "criminally underrated" in the game's history: Burke's only misfortune in the annals of golf is to have been at his best in the mid-1950s, in between names like Hogan and Palmer ...

A protege of Jimmy Demaret, Burke was well-respected in his time but nearly forgotten now, sadly because he won 16 times on the PGA Tour and captured both of his major titles in 1956, when he notched both the Masters and the PGA Championship.

Typical of his generation, Burke had given up many of the years of his prime to World War II: he served in the US Marine Corps overseas. But he wasn't forgotten entirely: Burke got his due with induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2000 and the PGA Tour lifetime achievement award in 2003. And here's our tip of the cap ...

Another World Golf Hall of Famer was also born today in 1945, in Detroit, Michigan. Donna Caponi-Byrnes went on to forge a golf career in the 1970s that, while often overshadowed by her publicity-happy foil Nancy Lopez, included four LPGA Tour majors and 24 LPGA Tour wins. That's a great career, folks, and culminated in a 2001 induction to the Hall of Fame, although Donna Caponi, still remains (even after her successful broadcasting career) ... criminally underrated!

Also in the underrated department, it was on this day in 1850 that the US Senator Henry Clay introduced a little-remembered compromise bill on slavery, which led to nothing significant immediately except for the admission of California as a "free state" in the United States six years later. Well, done, Senator ...

That said, it's tavalodet mobarak!, as they say in Farsi, to Oprah Winfrey (54), whose CV includes producer, actress, talk show host, car giver and publisher, the richest African-American of all time and the world's only black billionaire for three straight years. Nothing underrated about Oprah. And also happy birthdays to Magnum P.I. actor Tom Selleck (63), whose superb moustache must be at least a year or two older; to actor/director Edward Burns (40); and to hot-rod blues guitarist and born-again Christian rock phenom Jonny Lang (27).

And speaking of criminally underrated, it's also a happy 44th to Roddy Frame, who might be the best nearly-unknown singer-songwriter of the last 25 years. From Scotland's Postcard Records in the early 1980s and Aztec Camera fame to today's solo artist, nobody writes them quite like Roddy, and more power to him. Happy birthday, mate ...

It also would have been a birthday for Thomas Paine (b. 1737), the powerful and tireless pamphleteer whose writings inspired the American revolution against his native Britain, had he not succumbed to Common Sense after all and had the long nap beginning in 1809. ... 'Til tomorrow ...